Measuring a Small Number of Samples, and the 3v Fallacy: Shedding Light on Confidence and Error Intervals

Author

Schmid, Heinz ; Huber, Alex

Author_Institution

Inst. of Microelectron., Univ. of Appl. Sci. Norhtwestern Switzerland, Windisch, Switzerland

Volume

6

Issue

2

fYear

2014

fDate

Spring 2014

Firstpage

52

Lastpage

58

Abstract

Many solid-state circuits papers today report the mean and the standard deviation of measurement results obtained from a small number of test chips and then compare them with numbers other authors obtained. Almost none of them discuss confidence intervals, ranges of values for that standard deviation within which the true value lies with a certain probability. Many implicitly assume that the range would contain all but 0.27% of chip samples to be expected in volume production. This is incorrect even if it is certain that the measured quantity is exactly normal distributed.

Keywords

Tutorials; integrated circuit measurement; integrated circuit testing; probability; 3σ fallacy; confidence intervals; error intervals; solid-state circuits; standard deviation; test chips; volume production; Error probability; Gaussian distribution; Measurement uncertainty; Semiconductor device measurement; Stress measurement; Temperature measurement; Tutorials;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits Magazine, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1943-0582

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MSSC.2014.2313714

Filename

6841797